Scars
by Anne Maria
Summary: Wounds, scars, healing... Mara has a moment of introspection watching her husband and her son together.


**Timeframe: **Sometime after Ben's birth  
**Rated: **PG  
**Disclaimer:** Much as I'd like them to, none of these characters belongs to me. Lucas is the lucky one.

**A/N:** This had been gathering dust in my hard drive. It's time it saw some light :).  
**A/N:**Please read and review. Feedback is a wonderful thing for an author :)

I'm not usually given to reflecting and musing. Luke is more the one to do that in this marriage, whereas I generally jump into action. Yet, every now and then, when my attention is drawn towards something in particular, I do take some time to meditate about it. And so it is that I've often wondered why people so unwisely assume scars fade with time. The scars on your skin, maybe; tissue heals in the long run. But the scars on your soul -- I doubt those ever heal completely.

Look at me, for instance. My life has not exactly been a bed of Nabooian roses, and it's quite obvious when you think about it. Now, after so many years of knowing Luke, I can finally look back on my past objectively, and begin to see the consequences of Palpatine's brainwashing -- all he took from me, all the ways in which he hurt me. But even at this stage of my life, I'm afraid I can only glimpse the tip of the iceberg. When I think of him, it feels like a black hole: There's so much I lost, so much I missed out on, so many things I'll never get back, never experience...

I guess I'll never be able to fully assess the damage. Yet somehow, inside me, I'm perfectly conscious of all the harm my old Master caused me. It's as if my heart knew better than my mind all I could have had and never did.

Sometimes, when I hold Ben in my arms and look into his big, innocent eyes, I ask myself what it would have been like to have a mother to hold me like this, to make me safe like this. What would it have been like to wake up in the morning at the loving call of my mother's voice and not at the cold, harsh beeping of an alarm-chrono? What was my mother's voice like? And her hair? Was she a redhead, like me, or do I take after my father? From whom did I get my green eyes?

Other times, as I watch my little one play with his toys, so obviously enjoying himself, I wonder what I would have become if I had had the chance to dress dolls when I was a child instead of learning how to properly handle the most effective weapons the galaxy had to offer, or to take Alderaani ballet lesson instead of training in martial arts.

I know I'll never have answers for these questions, though. But I don't complain -- don't misunderstand me. I have Ben, and Luke, and that's more than I would have dreamed of in the past. Still, it'd be nice to know something about my parents, to get back some of the time that was stolen from me.

What no one seems to notice, though, is that Luke -- "farmboy," as I like to teasingly call him -- has also had his share of hardships. Granted, I know very few people are aware of his relationship to Anakin Skywalker, better known as Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine's henchman and the man responsible for Luke's missing right hand, but it's common knowledge that Luke Skywalker was the hero of the Battle of Yavin, the maverick young pilot who blew up the first Death Star.

People know about that, yes. But they either can't or refuse to see the other side of things. He may have saved the day for the Rebels by doing what he did, but he paid a high price for their victory. Not only did he lose some good friends there, but he also lost something even more irrecoverable: his innocence. Luke killed that day for the first time; he took millions of lives, some innocent, some not, but that's not what counts. What counts is that, to him, the beings in that battle station weren't just numbers, enemy soldiers to be destroyed. They were people -- mothers, fathers, husbands, wives -- who stopped existing in the blink of an eye.

And even if he was too young to be fully aware of the meaning of his actions back then, by the time the Battle of Endor took place he _did_ know.

When I watch him now, the way he reacts to the echoes of a death through the Force, I try to imagine what it must have been for him to feel the huge void in the Force where those lives had been just moments before, whether he was responsible for it or not. The loss of a single life is -- and I understand it at last -- always something to be grieved over.

And then there's all that followed his discovery of the Force and his choice to walk down its path: his aunt's and uncle's deaths, his finding his father and losing him soon afterwards, his fall to the dark side, his constant struggle to keep balance, his guilt and his unhealthy quest for perfection, Callista, his shutting out Leia and her family...

Yes, there are scars in Luke's soul.

He doesn't like to talk about these things, as I don't like to talk about my past. But I'm his wife; I know him, and I see the shadow in his eyes whenever he remembers them, whenever something goes wrong and he's forced to take a life. I hear him at night, when he tosses and turns in bed because of the nightmares. I know what goes on inside Luke.

I feel it, too, at times, the weight of the lives I've taken. It's different for me, somehow. I'm not saying I'm innocent, because that hasn't been true for a long time. I'm not sure it was ever true, in fact. Innocence was not something Palpatine considered necessary during my upbringing. But when I killed, I was carrying out my duty, complying with my Master's wishes, helping maintain order and peace. I can see that was a complete lie now, but I didn't then. I didn't know what I did was wrong, like Luke did. I think the fact that I've always been practical and pragmatic has something to do with it. In my life, there was never much time to reflect on the things I did. Until I met Luke, that is. But even now, I don't like to dwell upon these sorts of considerations for too long. My past was what it was, and it can't be changed.

And perhaps, if it hadn't been the way it was, I may not have been what I am today. I may not have been Luke's wife, Ben's mother, a Jedi... All I can do now is choose what to do with this priceless chance I've been given.

Luke, on the other hand, thinks too much. I've often told him it's not good, but it's obvious he can't help it, and I wouldn't have him any other way.

But the truth is Luke has gone through hard times as well, and he's been scarred, even if no one other than those closest to him notices it.

Leia told me once it was not always like this, though. He was different, she said, when she first met him. Back then, they were both only eighteen, and he was just off the farm, a Tatooine farmboy in every way, except in his heart. According to her words, he was fresh and naïve at that time, with the wide-eyed expression of one who sees the galaxy for the first time and is amazed by it, and the simplicity of a boy who has spent all of his life in a desert world, where you wake up early in the morning, work hard all day, and go to bed at night knowing the next day will be the same as the one that has just gone by.

War has changed him, no doubt, as it has changed all of us. But both Leia and I grew up knowing what it was like, living it. Luke, by contrast, came face to face with its horrors all of a sudden.

Sometimes I wish I'd known him in his first years with the Alliance. It would have been nice to see farmboy in all his glory. I chuckle to myself as I picture in my mind the image of Luke as Leia described him to me, with his sky-blue eyes open in wonder.

Nevertheless, I know it's no laughing matter. Our lives have marked us both, and although I catch glimpses of the naïve farmboy in Luke every now and then, it's never often enough. Scars just don't fade.

My greatest worry now is that Ben, our little Ben, may someday have to go through what we went through. His father and I have worked, are working, and will always work hard so that never happens, so he never has to see the dark days of the Empire return. But we're fallible, we're human, and he will grow up and leave us one day, and then we won't be able to protect him anymore. I just don't want my son to share our scars. It seems that, after all, I _did_ have a maternal instinct hidden somewhere inside me.

"Love?" I suddenly hear Luke's voice call from the lounge, where he's been playing with Ben for hours, and it jolts me out of my trance.

"Coming, husband." I answer, knowing that will make him smile.

As I rise to meet my son and the man I love, I reflect that, whatever the future holds, and even though we'll carry our scars with us forever, the fact that we saved each other, in so many more ways than one, will never change. As neither will the fact that we'll always keep fighting to make the galaxy a safer place.

We're warriors by nature, and we're willingly bound together in love and the Force, forever without end.


End file.
